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Liquidate ’68
It is crucial to gauge the gap between the reactive formalism and the
obscure formalism. As violent as it may be, reaction conserves the
form of the faithful subject as its articulated unconscious. It does not
propose to abolish the present, only to show that the faithful rupture
(which it calls “violence” or “terrorism”) is useless for engendering a
moderate, that is to say extinguished, present (a present that it calls
“modern”). . . . Things are very different for the obscure subject. That
is because it is the present that is directly its unconscious, its lethal
disturbance, while it disarticulates within appearance the formal
data of fidelity. The monstrous full Body to which it gives fictional
shape is the atemporal filling of the abolished present. [It entertains]
everywhere and at all times the hatred of any living thought, of any
transparent language and of every uncertain becoming. (LM, 69)
. Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 69. This work has been trans-
lated into English by Alberto Toscano, as Logics of Worlds (London: Continuum, 2009).
Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as LM; page numbers refer to the French
edition.
. See Stathis Kouvélakis, La France en révolte (Paris: Textuel, 2007).
30 boundary 2 / Spring 2009
. Alas, this take on 1968 has been put forward by less obnoxious sources: the otherwise
excellent Adam Curtis, for instance, in his spurious attack on R. D. Laing’s antipsychiatry
in the recent BBC documentary series The Trap; or Régis Debray, who, in the New Left
Review ’s issue on the tenth anniversary of 1968 famously portrayed it as a vanishing
mediator of sorts for American hedonistic capitalism.
. This quote, and the one from Cohn-Bendit below, is taken from a pro-Royal Weblog,
Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May 31
Chirac, were held in contempt by much of the union rank and file and by
the entirety of the Maoist and Trotskyist Left, another statement of Royal’s
should also be kept in mind: she in fact accused Sarkozy of trying to pro-
voke “another 1968.” In this second sense, closer to the reactive one in
Badiou’s terminology, 1968 stands in for disorder, crisis, anomie, and a con-
flict that must be averted at all costs by the efforts of a stalwart reform-
ism. It is not in any way the cipher for a moment of political invention, for
the possibility of a radical restructuring of society. The tenor of the “Left”
ripostes to Sarkozy in the French media were also symptomatic. Daniel
Cohn-Bendit, now a rather self-regarding European parliamentarian, pre-
dictably rehashed his long-time anticommunism to brand Sarkozy’s liqui-
dationism as “Bolshevik” and, in faultless Euro-liberal form, praised ’68 for
its “liberation of the autonomy of individuals.” Many others emphasized the
“values” of freedom and autonomy, but in the guise of a salutary infusion of
joy, pleasure, and mobility into the polity, not in terms of a radical alternative
to the status quo.
. For the diagnosis of an emblematic case in this regard, see Daniel Bensaïd, Un nou-
veau théologien: Bernard-Henri Lévy (Paris: Lignes, 2007). Deleuze’s seminal analysis of
the nouveaux philosophes, “A propos des nouveaux philosophes et d’un probleme gen-
eral” (1977), now in Two Regimes of Madness (New York: Semiotext[e], 2006), remains
one of the most acute dissections of this phenomenon.
Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May 33
Badiou recognizes that the “lesser evil” argument is bolstered by its key
subjective correlate, one that from a very different perspective had already
been identified and condemned by Hannah Arendt in her 1950’s criticisms
of “ex-communist” cold warriors—what Badiou encapsulates in the thesis
“we tried, and it was a catastrophe,” or, more pithily: “I fail, therefore I am.”
He paints an unforgiving portrait of those who—having learned the ropes
of politics and strategy from their revolutionary commitment—now censure
their previous fidelity as a youthful diversion which merely delayed their
rise to positions of power and prestige. Badiou heaps contempt on the
form of reasoning that underlies these comfortable conversions: “Imagine
a mathematician who, having toiled with few results on a problem, would
declare that since he failed, the problem no longer exists! Note that such a
mathematician would not, because of his declaration, be propelled into the
Academy of the Sciences, whilst it seems that having failed in revolution-
ary politics, if one flaunts it loudly enough, justifies the greatest hopes in
journalism. I fail, therefore I am.” But for Badiou the political problems that
10. See Alberto Toscano, “The Bourgeois and the Islamist, or, The Other Subjects of
Politics,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 2, no. 1–2
(2006): 15–38.
Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May 35
thought arises, and some of the political motivations that lie behind his
rather Althusserian treatment of philosophy as an activity not of critique
or totalization but of polemical demarcation. Hopefully, a number of the
lessons that may be drawn from Badiou’s rather singular trajectory will be
of interest for a broader reckoning not just with the legacy of ’68 but more
specifically with the many forms taken by its repudiation, disavowal, and
negation.
Much of the attraction of Badiou’s thought in the current conjuncture
may be said to stem from the verve and precision with which he revives
philosophy’s combative vocation. In Logiques des mondes, as we shall see
and as we’ve already suggested, he even provides a transhistorical for-
malization of the subjective space in which militancy coexists with reaction
and obscurantism. But what in the more recent work takes an often formal
guise, in Badiou’s earlier writings, especially his Maoist pamphlets from the
1970s, is filled with very specific content. We will thus begin with a treat-
ment of Badiou’s polemical view of the ideological field in the wake of ’68,
proceed to his understanding of the philosophies of the Restoration in the
1980s and 1990s, and conclude by considering the place of antiegalitarian
or nonuniversal subjects in Badiou’s formal theory of the subject, as set out
in Book 1 of Logiques des mondes.
Arguably the key plank, as well as the source, of Badiou’s later ven-
tures into polemology and demarcation is his discussion of revisionism in
the early 1970s. In a number of texts principally concerned with outlining
the stance of his Maoist organization, the UCFML (Groupe pour la fonda-
tion d’une Union des communistes de France marxiste-léniniste), toward
the major French unions (CGT and CFDT) and the French Communist
Party (PCF), Badiou engages in a seemingly orthodox application of the
terminology of the Sino-Soviet clash, and its intensification in the period of
the Cultural Revolution, to the context of post-’68 French politics. The epi-
thets of social-imperialism, social-colonialism, and even the social-fascism
of the “Third Period” Third International make their appearance (one could
criticize these appellations using Badiou’s own refutation of notions like
Islamic fundamentalism or “Islamofascism” in Infinite Thought,11 where
the adjective-noun complex is deemed to hide the vacuity or vagueness
11. Alain Badiou, “Philosophy and the ‘War against Terrorism,’” in Infinite Thought, trans.
and ed. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London: Continuum, 2003), 141–64.
36 boundary 2 / Spring 2009
of the two terms). The strategic horizon is provided by what Badiou calls
a “revisionist counter-offensive,” the PCF project for state power after the
weakening of the revolutionary upsurge of ’68. Whereas other Marxist-
Leninist groups (PCMLF, Gauche prolétarienne) are targets of derision for
their merely “ideological” criticism of the PCF line, Badiou depicts a situa-
tion in which the drive for emancipation is stuck between one bourgeois
project (liberal capitalist) and another (that of the PCF, or what Badiou in
his Maoist idiom calls “the state-bureaucratic monopolistic fraction of the
French imperialist bourgeoisie,” whose aim is “an imperialist bourgeois
state of a new type”—Badiou even goes so far as painting the PCF as a
party whose intrinsic logic pushes it to a coup d’état scenario . . .). In this
wholly militant period of Badiou’s production, it is not just political criteria
that serve to identify and oppose antiegalitarian projects: revisionist sub-
jectivities are also grounded in a class analysis of sorts. Though Badiou
opposes the idea according to which the PCF is a petty-bourgeois party,
he does seek its organizational basis in an elitist, hierarchical, and techni-
cal “labor aristocracy,” and reiterates that the diagnosis of social-fascism
is founded on regarding the PCF from the perspective of its project: the
seizure and administration of state power.12
The “social” in the term social-fascism thus refers to the instrumen-
talization of a mass base of working-class supporters and the employment
of a counterfeit Marxist ideology, for the sake of a project that would propose
to solve the crisis of capitalism through a nationalist, statist, and organic
centralization of power within a bureaucratic apparatus. Viewed from the
standpoint of Badiou’s own political line, the field is thus one of complex
antagonism: the position of the UCFML is not only faced with two enemies
juxtaposed to one another (classical monopolism and bureaucratic mono-
polism), but within the union movement itself it is confronted with revision-
ism (the CGT as pro-PCF union) and opportunism, that form of anarcho-
syndicalist unionism which promotes self-management and repudiates
state-power but in the end is perfectly compatible with the parliamentary
order (the CFDT and other organizations). We thus have an opposition
between state projects, as well as an antagonism between different types
of struggle. Finally, as Badiou’s 1978 pamphlet on the contestation within
the PCF makes clear, where he lambastes Althusser and his ilk for their
political debility, revisionism, and opportunism, all find their ultimate reason
12. See Alain Badiou, “Édification du parti et question syndicale,” Théorie et politique 3/4
(1975): 114–18; “Syndicalisme et révisionnisme moderne,” Théorie et politique 5 (1975):
58–87; La « contestation » dans le P.C.F (Paris: Éditions Potemkine, 1978).
Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May 37
in the manner that they react, however implicitly, to the “real” they are trying
to repress: egalitarian revolutionary politics (needless to say, this “real” is
Badiou’s own politics).
15. See, among several important articles he has devoted to Badiou’s politics, Bruno
Bosteels, “Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics,” positions: east asia cultures critique 13,
no. 3 (2005): 575–634.
40 boundary 2 / Spring 2009
16. Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005).
17. Badiou, Metapolitics, 128.
Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May 41
Badiou’s attack on the use and abuse of the language of human rights
is amongst his most trenchant of recent critiques, most particularly in his
Ethics, from 1993. There he claims that the “return to the old doctrine of
the natural rights of man is obviously linked to the collapse of revolution-
ary Marxism”18 and professes his fidelity to the line of French antihuman-
ism that includes Foucault, Althusser, and Lacan. However, the question
of Badiou’s relationship to the humanism-antihumanism debate is a much
more complex one than his apparently straightforward attack on ethical and
human rights discourse might suggest.
Against the evacuation of any positive use of the term in Althusser’s
work and its reduction to mere ideological effect, it is clear that Badiou
wants to retain a post-Sartrean conception of the “subject,” and that this
has been the case from his earlier, more heavily political works (Théo-
rie du sujet, 1982), to his later exercises in meta-ontology and a theory of
truth (Being and Event, 1988, and Logiques des mondes, 2006). However,
we can immediately complicate this claim by noting that the later Badiou
does take on board one aspect of the Althusserian claim that there are
no extant “subjects” qua autonomous agents, alongside the seemingly
opposed Sartrean idea that subjectivation is possible and, indeed, desir-
able. Badiou’s relationship to the claims and vicissitudes of the so-called
humanism-antihumanism debate plays out over the question of how and
why he retains and defines, not just a question of who or what the collec-
tive political subject might be but also what the significance of the “sub-
ject” might be for philosophy in toto. His work is an attempt to merge and
go beyond the two terms of the debate, in which structuralism “opposes”
humanism, by entering into a topological discourse that nevertheless per-
mits the continued possible existence of the subject (indeed, we could say
that Badiou’s preservation of the “subject” is the most consistent element
of his work). Whilst Badiou seeks to align himself with the antihumanism of
Foucault, Lacan, and Althusser, against both a “return to Kant” in human
rights discourse and the “bad Darwinism” of a contemporary conception
of man as finite animal, there are hints, both explicit and implicit, of his
belonging to a longer trajectory of “political humanism.”
Indeed, we see this in particular in Badiou’s mathematico-political
deployment of terms such as generic, and its political correlate generic
humanity. We don’t wish to argue that Badiou’s “mathematical turn” is
necessarily over-determined by his politics, as some have suggested, but
18. Alain Badiou, Ethics, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 4.
42 boundary 2 / Spring 2009
rather that the mathematics and politics coimplicate each other in ways
which entail that when Badiou uses terms like revolution the resonances
are intended to be heard at both levels, scientific and historico-political.
The major claim made here is that Badiou’s use of the term humanism is,
however, evidence of a political struggle whose vicissitudes have lent the
philosophical implications of the word a different sense at different points
between the original “debate” of the 1960s and the contemporary era: the
story here with regard to Badiou’s work is how the impossibility of using
the term in the era of Stalin (“a ‘Soviet humanism’ through which we can
glimpse the well-heeled dachas and the black Mercedes,” he writes19) has
been transformed into the possibility of equating the quasi-Feuerbachian
term generic humanity with the politics of an egalitarian communism
(“Equality means that the political actor is represented under the sole sign
of his specifically human capacity”20).
The rationalist insistence that “people think” appears everywhere
in Badiou. In an article titled “Democratic Materialism,” excerpted from
Logiques de mondes, Badiou asks “what do we think, today?”21 We should
not, of course, understand this as a Heideggerian worry that thought is not
yet happening, but rather as the persistent claim that thought itself has
been betrayed, in the various revisionist and reactionary antipolitical for-
mations. Badiou’s claim in this piece that the status quo can be summed
up by its “natural” belief that “There are only bodies and languages”22
conveys his contempt for identity politics and the superficial investment in
cultural and linguistic differences. For Badiou, difference is not something
to be dragged up and hailed, but rather the banal stuff of human life; to
reify difference is to deny that sameness is also possible—the sameness
of a political project, a shared commitment to a political goal (and here
Badiou is extremely Sartrean). Against this democratic materialism, Badiou
proposes a materialist dialectic—as he freely confesses, a rather old and
unfashionable phrase—which adds the important proviso to the phrase
“there are only bodies and languages” except that there are truths to the
phrase “there are only bodies and languages.” This exception is precisely
19. See Alain Badiou, “Selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution,” trans.
Alberto Toscano with Lorenzo Chiesa and Nina Power, positions: east asia cultures cri-
tique 13, no. 3 (2005): 635–48.
20. Alain Badiou, “Philosophy and Politics,” Radical Philosophy 96 (1999): 29.
21. Alain Badiou, “Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectic,” Radical Philoso-
phy 130 (2005): 20.
22. Badiou, “Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectic,” 20.
Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May 43
arguments and subjective forms. In other words, the theory of the sub-
ject needs to countenance the fact that reactionary forms of subjectivation
exist—which for Badiou unsurprisingly take the shape of the anticommu-
nist antitotalitarianism which spurred the backlash of revisionist histori-
ans (Furet) and the renegade nouveaux philosophes (Glucksmann) to the
emancipatory innovations arising in the wake of May ’68.
In the place of an earlier reliance on class analysis and political par-
tisanship, the dependence of subjectivity on the event permits Badiou to
propose a philosophical argument as to why “other” subjects are radically
dependent on a subject of truth. As he writes, “From a subjective point of
view, it is not because there is reaction that there is revolution, it is because
there is revolution that there is reaction” (LM, 71). This Maoist thesis of the
primacy of revolt, which Badiou had already formulated as early as his 1975
Théorie de la contradiction, is now philosophically articulated in terms of
the key “temporal” category of Badiou’s theory of the subject, that of the
present. In responding to the trace of a supernumerary, illegal event, and in
constructing the body that can bring the implications of this event to bear
on a given world, a faithful subject is involved in the production of a present.
Indeed, the only subjective temporality, which is to say the only historicity,
envisaged in Badiou’s system derives from such an irruption of generic
universality into the status quo.
But if the present, as a kind of rigorous and continued sequence of
novelties belongs to the subject of truth, how can “other subjects” partake
in it? Badiou’s contention is that they do so in a strictly derivative and para-
sitic (albeit by no means passive) manner. As he puts it, subjective “des-
tinations proceed in a certain order (to wit: production → denial → occulta-
tion), for reasons that formalism makes altogether clear: the denial of the
present supposes its production, and its occultation supposes a formula of
denial” (LM, 71).
Given the arduous and ongoing production of a truth, reactionary
subjects seek to deny the event that called it into being, and to disaggre-
gate the body which is supposed to carry the truth of that event. It is for
this reason that reaction, according to Badiou, involves the production of
another, “extinguished” present. The thesis of reaction, at base, is that all
of the “results” of a truth procedure (e.g., political equality in the French
revolution) could be attained without the terroristic penchant of the faithful
subject, and without the affirmation of a radically novel event. As Badiou
recognizes, this constitutes an active denial of truth, which demands
the creation of reactionary statements and indeed of what we could call
Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May 45